DEARBORN, MI — U.S. Secretary Steven Chu expects American vehicle manufacturers like the Detroit Three to be testing "affordable" electrified vehicles by 2020.

“The OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) really want to drive to get the affordable thing because that becomes mass-market,” he told reporters following a speech this morning in Dearborn. “If you are selling a car at $60,000, it’s a niche market.”

Testing, according to Chu, could take four years.

Chu spoke at the government’s “EV-Everywhere Grand Challenge Kick-Off” conference. The program — a part of the DOE’s “Clean Energy Grand Challenges” — was announced earlier this year by President Barack Obama to make electric vehicles more affordable and convenient to own and drive than today’s gasoline-powered vehicles within the next 10 years.

The end-all goal of the program is to enable companies to be the first in the world to produce a five-passenger affordable American electrified vehicle with a payback time of less than 5 years and a fuel-range to meet drivers' daily driving.

“Realistically, we think a plug-in hybrid at 340-50 miles, or a car at double the (Nissan) Leaf range can satisfy a lot of needs,” he said. “And there, we think, the price point of $25,000 is a very real price that we can maybe achieve in a decade.”

To achieve this “aggressive” goal, the government is working with universities, national laboratories and its partners. Chu said they are looking to develop better censors for monitoring battery activity, standardizing fuel cell system and extending warranties, among other advances.

Chu said this year’s presidential election should not have an impact on advancing the department’s goals.

“This is something having to do with industrial competitiveness,” he said. “We have the innovation, skills and abilities to really be the major player in this field.”

Representatives from numerous Michigan companies, including General Motors Co. and Dow Chemical Co., were in-attendance for the conference.

The EV-Everywhere Challenge is the second of the DOE's "Grand Challenges," following the model of the $1/watt SunShot Challenge, which seeks to make solar power directly cost-competitive with electricity from fossil fuels by the end of the decade.

Over the next few months, the DOE will announce a series of additional challenges, "each focused on pursuing technical innovations and reductions in cost that will enable clean energy technologies to compete directly, without subsidies, with the energy technologies that are currently in wide use today."